Comment by vunderba
4 months ago
Great article. The mention of Cyrix brought back a rush of nostalgia - one of the earlier PCs I built used a Cyrix 686 166mhz processor.
From the article:
> 8BitDo makes a fantastic modern keyboard inspired by the M looks and feel.
Hard disagree. I found most of their keyboard replicas to be rather cheap feeling. However, their controllers such as the Arcade Stick and Pro 2 are excellent.
I think the closest approximation you can get to an old school model M keyboard with buckler springs is probably from Unicomp. If you don't care about that kind of authenticity I would just stick with something like a Keychron mechanical keyboard and call it a day.
I had the same Cyrix cpu and all I remember is that FPU performance was terrible in Quake.
I had a Cyrix 6x86MX and it was good enough for Quake (I played Quake originally on a Pentium-60, and it was fine).
The Quake code was designed to take advantage of the fact that the Pentium could have one integer and one FPU instruction in flight at the same time, thanks to optimizations by an even bigger space-alien wizard than John Carmack -- Michael Abrash. The Cyrix CPUs... couldn't dual-issue instructions like this, so clock-for-clock their performance suffered compared to Intel.
Pentium innovation was FPU that could have many instructions in flight. You would issue 0 cycle free FXCH and keep filling pipeline with new FPU instructions
https://github.com/id-Software/Quake/blob/bf4ac424ce754894ac...
486, Cyrix, K5 were stopping until previous instruction retires, and even AMD up to late K6-2 revision couldnt do 0 cycle FXCH.
It was alright in Quake, as I recall, but it really didn't cope at all well with Quake 2 and Jedi Knight.